IBSEN was so secretive about his private life that one wonders what he had to hide. He appears to have been bitterly ashamed of his father's fecklessness, which brought the family down from considerable prosperity to genteel poverty, and his whole life could be regarded as an effort to cancel that past and acquire, through literature, an aristocratic status.

There was also another matter which Ibsen never mentioned: when he was 18 he fathered an illegitimate child and was ordered to pay alimony for 14 years. He could not always meet the payments and was sentenced to forced labour in prison to pay off the debt. This crisis was averted by his appointment as assistant director to a new theatre in Bergen, thanks to the two plays he had written and his ability to write patriotic verse. The penniless student who had thought of becoming a doctor was now launched on the rising, tide of Norwegian theatre.

Norway had been under Danish domination for 400 years and in Ibsen's early years both the language, and actors of the theatre were Danish, even though the country had by now become a colony of Sweden. The nationalist urges of the nineteenth century, personified culturally in the work of Ibsen, Grieg, Munch and Hamsun, culminated in the gaining of independence in 1905. Ibsen's task in Bergen was to train Norwegian actors and create a Norwegian repertoire. A timid but prickly 24 year old, he was not out standingly successful nor were the plays he wrote, but their language and subject matter - they were set in the period of the old Norse sagas - were looked on favourably, and after six years in Bergen he successfully applied for the post of director in one of the two principal theatres in the capital Kristiania (now Oslo).

His salary was now doubled and he married Suzannah Thoresen, whom he had met in Bergen. They had one son, Sigurd, after whose birth Suzannah announced that she would have no more children - tantamount in those days to a declaration of abstinence. In the married couples of the later plays the emphasis on the mental rather than the physical aspects of the relationship mirrors the Ibsens' own situation. What held their marriage so firmly together was that "both parties shared the religious notion of a call in their lives. Suzannah's was to ensure that Ibsen became a great writer, and Ibsen's was the same.

When Ibsen was in his 60s and his status, both social and artistic, was assured, the couple seemed to have little in common and lived "in the most complete bourgeois silence", in the one house but alone in their separate worlds. Ibsen's brief platonic flirtations with women 40 years younger were more of an irritation than a worry to Suzannah, but she made him dismiss a servant girl who cossetted him in a way that undermined her more austere regime.

At the age of 36 Ibsen obtained a travel grant to Rome and he and his wife and son left Norway. They were not to return for 27 years, for to Ibsen Norway meant humiliation and frustration and debts he could not pay. His state of continual resentment acted as a trigger to his creative impulses in his self enforced exile, though he had little cause for complaint when the publication of Brand, a long poem in dramatic form, and his first work to be written in Italy, earned him a life time grant to write from the Norwegian government. His next work, Peer Gynt, another dramatic poem, consolidated his reputation in Scandinavia; but it was the series of prose plays about contemporary life, from A Doll's House to Hedda Gabler, that made him famous in Europe, next only to Tolstoy.

Ibsen was loath to return to Norway; he would not "allow himself to be trampled to death by geese" in his own colourful phrase, but under pressure from his wife and son he succumbed. He was now 63 and wrote four more plays before his stroke in 1900, when he was 72. He died in 1905 and his last words were characteristically aggressive: "On the contrary!"

The Norwegian critic Brandes was "fascinated, repelled, attracted and utterly baffled" by Ibsen. With some help from the plays, Robert Ferguson has endeavoured to humanise Ibsen and delve beneath the public personality created with assiduous care over so many years, but there is little to admire in the man apart from his doggedness. In Italy he had kept a scorpion in a beer glass and whenever it was sickly he gave it soft fruit to inject its poison into, whereupon it recovered. In the final chapter Ferguson refers to Suzannah as "the fruit to Ibsen's scorpion, and certainly it is clear that without her he "would not have overcome what he chose to regard as the inveterate hostility of circumstances. She alone was not baffled by him.